Iron Mountain ski jump

Friday, November 19, 2010

Spam & Memory

Blogspot recently suggest that I, along with all other bloggers, I’m sure, should check my “spam comments” box once in a while.

Spam with an “S” is a food-like substance that comes in a can with a peel-off metal tab to open it. Spam with an “s” is an email-like substance that Blogspot peels off and puts where you can’t see it.

The box for spam comments contains those comments which the spam filter has taken out. I’m not sure what those would be. I looked into the appropriate box. I had no spam comments. So I’m still wondering.

We used to eat Spam. My little brother was especially fond of it. He likes salt and fat.

Now it’s a word for stuff you don’t want to deal with, that has to be put in a different place.

I just Googled Spam. It’s an Hormel product. I clicked on the link. I got the message, “Service unavailable.” Poor Spam. It’s become a bad word on the web, “unsolicited bulk emails,” that has to be put in a box where you can’t even see it, and now the web won’t even serve it.

We once tried to go to the Spam museum. It was in a small mall in Austin, MN, I think. We used to go through Austin on our way from Mason City, IA to Rochester, MN. It wasn’t open that day. [The Spam museum, not Austin.]

Old people think about memory a lot, especially the loss of it. But when I think about memory, I think about S/spam, because…

…memory is a lot like S/spam: It can mean a lot of different things. There are things in there you don’t want to know about. It tastes good because there’s lots of salt and fat. It has a lot of ingredients, some of them mysterious. There’s a museum about it somewhere, but you can’t quite remember where, and it’s probably closed.